For decades, the eccentric town of South Park has delivered some of the greatest laughs, largest controversies, and most profound moments in broadcast television history. From enraging politicians and celebrities to turning an annoying bully’s parents into chili over a 16-dollar scam, the show has gone to topics and themes that opened the gateways to modern adult animation and comedy.
With a track record of quality that most other shows could only wish to achieve, deciding which episodes are stronger than the rest can seem like a tall order. When it comes to South Park, it’s a place where you can unwind with some of the best the industry has to offer.
10 Chef Goes Nanners
Season 4, Episode 7’s Chef Goes Nanners is one of many times that South Park’s coverage of socially divisive issues aged like a fine wine. Chef is outraged at the racially charged town flag of South Park, a remnant of its pre-civil rights era and the town’s founding. With the town either solidly against changing the flag, or wholly undecided on the matter, Chef finds himself becoming more and more radical in response.
With the town’s kids charged with spearheading the decision to change the flag or not based on their school debate club, the entire town realizes how the refusal to understand and reasonably compromise can tear people apart from each other. With the debate over statues, flags, and sports team names only heating up in the twenty years since this episode’s release, its message feels more important now than ever, with some solid comedy to boot.
9 The Passion Of The Jew
For the first part of Season 8, Cartman has been using the then-newly released Mel Gibson movie ‘The Passion of the Christ’ in his usual jabs towards Kyle. Thoroughly fed up, Kyle goes to see the film in person to disprove Cartman’s assertion that the film proves Jewish people were responsible for the death of Jesus. Instead, he walks out of the violent film traumatized and guilt-ridden, questioning his faith.
All the while, Kyle and Stan hated the movie so much that they track down the cartoonishly unhinged Mel Gibson to get their refunds directly, and Cartman uses the film’s popularity to unknowingly organize the town’s adults into a paramilitary group under his command. An insane film star and director, one of Cartman’s most daring schemes to date, and a genuine debate over a crisis of religious faith make this episode a romp to enjoy from front to back.
8 Osama Bin Laden Has Farty Pants
While everyone was either in mourning or beating the drums of war following the devastating attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, South Park decided to deliver on something the country needed in these dark times: A good laugh. Traveling to the Middle East to return a pet goat, the boys are captured and brought before Bin Laden himself, and it’s all uphill from here. As the military moves to assault the compound and Stan’s mother, like many Americans, is still horrified and glued to the news networks, Cartman engages Bin Laden in one-on-one Looney Tunes combat.
Seeing Osama be bested and humiliated a dozen times over by a fourth-grade American, then getting unceremoniously shot in the head on millions of television screens is the exact kind of morale boost the nation needed amidst this tragedy and gave audiences the first mainstream criticism of the police-state security measures America took after 9/11 thanks to South Park’s quick production schedule.
7 Mystery Of The Urinal Deuce
Only in South Park can a middle school teacher’s outrage over someone pooping in a urinal lead to the truth about the 9/11 terror attacks. With Cartman using this urinal poop incident to pin 9/11 on Kyle, the entire town decides that the truth behind 9/11 has to be uncovered to avoid further confusing the town’s children. In comes The Hardly Boys, a parody of the long-lived detective series The Hardy Boys, who are tasked with uncovering the urinal mystery and 9/11 at the same time.
Mystery of the Urinal Deuce puts a spotlight on everyone’s naivety, showing the insane lengths people will go to justify conspiracy theories, all while poking fun at the gullibility of the average man. Tie it all together with Mr. Mackey being at his absolute peak characterization and some outstanding use of crude humor, and this episode is thought-provoking and gut-bursting at the exact same time.
6 Bass To Mouth
Mobile internet access created a new level of predatory journalism and gossip, and South Park was in no way spared. A new gossip blog is taking the town by storm, and the kids of South Park Elementary are at the forefront of it, with personal emails, private photos, and conversations being sensationalized and plastered all over the web. The culprit behind it all? An actual rat that has a camcorder taped to his head.
At the same time, the school’s teachers are backed into a deal with the devil by going along with Cartman’s scheme to have most of the school poo their pants with laxative-laced pizza to keep a few previous children from being singled out and bullied. With everyone’s dirty secrets at risk of exposure, this is a rare instance of a general truce between otherwise unassociated characters as a team effort is needed to stop the devious rat known as Wikileaks.
5 Le Petit Tourette
Eric Cartman is no stranger to being a terrible person, and he manages to try again and again, outwitting more people than one may think as he pursues whatever goal his twisted mind is set on achieving. When a chance trip to the toy store exposes Cartman to the concept of Tourettes Syndrome, he immediately capitalizes on it for his own gain. In a matter of days, he’s convinced most of the town that his condition is real, and only Kyle is suspicious and ready to call him on his act.
With Kyle breathing down his neck, Cartman has to double down on his act as he works to get onto Dateline and use his condition to lambast Kyle and the Jewish people on national television to an adoring audience, all the while coming up with the most outlandish insults the show’s ever featured. From the first scene until the actual credits scroll, Le Petit Tourette is some of the show’s finest back-to-back comedy.
4 Make Love, Not Warcraft
Rolling with the punches is the only way to avoid making things worse if someone is the target of South Park’s ridicule, and Blizzard Entertainment knew it. Using the actual Warcraft engine to animate specific in-game moments, Blizzard amplified an amazing episode into one of South Park’s finest.
With a true No-Life player terrorizing the town, Stan, Cartman, Kyle, and Kenny dedicate themselves to beating him at his own game. One of the closing lines, “What do you mean? Now we can finally play the game,” after the boys ruined their lives for hundreds of hours to grind for gear is another well-aged-moment that is further reflected in the time-sink oriented unlock models in modern AAA gaming.
3 The Coon
The kids in South Park create their own superhero personas and quickly graduate from playing pretend to get roped into actual vigilante work, spearheaded by the unidentified Mysterion. These superhero identities would become recurring elements in the show, and were the basis for the video game South Park: The Fractured But Whole in 2017.
A hilarious satire of the superhero genre and tropes, colorful costumes, and witty writing helps elevate this episode away from the usual trappings of parody content and keeps everything energetic and compelling. The Coon is a wild romp that mixes up the status quo without killing anyone off or offending another irritable celebrity.
2 Casa Bonita
Most tv shows can’t boast about their ability to single-handedly drive up a restaurant’s popularity, but South Park did just that and so much more. Realizing Butters is taking the final spot at Kyle’s birthday party at the Mexican entertainment restaurant Casa Bonita, Cartman tricks Butters into thinking the apocalypse has happened and hides him away from the town. With Butters nowhere to be found and Cartman putting on his nice face, Kyle allows Cartman to take Butters’ spot.
With Cartman’s deception revealed in the Casa Bonita parking lot and the cops inbound, Cartman makes a mad dash inside to enjoy as much of Casa Bonita as he can before he’s inevitably dragged off in handcuffs. Did he regret any of it? No, this is Cartman we’re talking about. The actual Casa Bonita restaurant in Colorado is a fan-favorite location for showrunners Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who now own and operate the business after severe financial burdens during the Covid pandemic, but continues to drive fans to visit from around the country.
1 Scott Tenorman Must Die
South Park was never the same after Scott Tenorman Must Die first aired on television. After this fateful outing, Cartman fully graduated from a manipulative child into a proper psychopath. When an obnoxious teenager pushes Cartman one too many times with his quick-witted pranks, Cartman retaliates in the worst possible way. In a gathered crowd of viewers, Cartman uses a chili competition to trick Scott into eating chili made from the corpses of his parents, who had been shot and killed by a rancher after Cartman set them up, with Scott’s favorite band, Radiohead, appearing immediately after this revelation at Cartman’s invitation and immediately insulting Scott for being a crybaby.
Scott may be a bully in need of being brought down a peg, and Cartman may be a conspiratorial and silver-tongued jerk, but the episode’s plot twist forever changed South Park. Nothing was off-limits without having to drag Jesus or Satan into things, and even Stan and Kyle were mortified by how far Cartman went to retaliate at Scott. From here on out, Cartman’s schemes would escalate in end goals, methodology, and violence well beyond what he was once capable of.
